Floral economies

Abstract

Biology and economics are surprisingly similar disciplines. At their core, both fields are the study of competitive interactions for scarce resources and the consequences of those interactions over time. Perhaps the first person to notice this similarity was Charles Darwin, who credited his reading of the influential economist Thomas Robert Malthus with catalysing his understanding of natural selection as the driving force of evolution. While it may not have been recognised at the time, this was not the only area of Darwin’s thinking to parallel economic concepts. Show more